After porting and maintaining the MicroBlaze kernel for a number of years, in 2008 presenter John Williams and his company PetaLogix took on a medium-sized product development project for a Japanese electronics company. The project - a real-time embedded video processing system using Xilinx FPGAs, soft CPUs and custom image processing hardware - took us out of the comfortable and esoteric world of low-level kernel hacking and off into custom hardware IP development, user space application and library programming and preparation for manufacturing and production.

From an initial client meeting in Tokyo to production-ready system images in just over 12 months, this story gives some insights into what can be achieved with small, flexible teams using modern development platforms and processes. In this presentation I'll tell as much as my client will allow about this very interesting system, give a brief introduction to what it means to run Linux inside a programmable FPGA hardware, and relate some war stories arising when a kernel hacker builds a complete system almost from the ground up.

Dr John Williams is the owner and CEO of PetaLogix, an embedded Linux solutions provider spun-out from his research and development activities at The University of Queensland, Australia. He was the architect and original maintainer of the Linux kernel port to the Xilinx MicroBlaze FPGA-based CPU, and consults widely in industry helping companies get the most out of this exciting embedded architecture. He has recently partnered with Xilinx, the world's leading FPGA vendor, to deliver and present educational workshops on FPGAs and Embedded Linux at key universities worldwide. In his former life he was a research academic at The University of Queensland, a position he now maintains on a part-time basis, and in the distant past he completed a PhD in 3D computer vision and image processing.